Choice
by MeredithBrody
Summary: The morning after her second night with James, Brody thinks about the three men in her life, and finally the heart does make a choice. (Ep Tag for 1x18. Spoilers included. Prody)
1. James

**OK so, here's a little background on me. I have been in love with Luke Mably (who played James) for close to 15 years. I have been shouting at EVERYONE I know about the fact he's playing Brody's ex since I found out. SO, unsurprisingly I liked the character. But like a good shipper I figured out how to spin this episode. I also don't like Sam the Psychologist. That is probably obvious. SO. This episode is the morning after the last scene in 1x18, and there are, of course, spoilers involved. As always, please read and review.  
Shin xx **

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She'd woken up with James twice in three days. That told her that her heart probably hadn't been the one picking. Her libido had. Maybe that wasn't for the best, but it was what she'd picked. Today she wasn't being woken up by a call from LaSalle, and she wasn't going to be doing the walk of shame into Sebastian's lab. Which she knew LaSalle would never let her forget. Instead she woke up to James' questioning face. "So, Sam the Psychologist?"

"You keep calling him that." She scoffed a little. James knew Sam's surname, she knew he did, but that apparently wasn't stopping him using the little nickname he'd made up. It somehow still sounded respectful coming from that British accent.

"It works." James smiled then shifted a little more so he could see her better. He'd made it clear he was going to be leaving again, today, so at least that solved any messy situations, but she was glad that he'd helped her figure some things out. She'd been taking things slow because Sam wasn't right for her, that seemed obvious now. She wouldn't have jumped into bed with James if that hadn't been the case. "You going to keep seeing him?"

"After this, no. Probably not." She might as well be honest. She might still see him, maybe keep it a little more casual. Less likely to pass into being a long-term relationship. But he wasn't the one, she still needed to keep looking, because it sure as hell wasn't James either. But the fact of why she'd picked to invite him here was important. "Something said on the case made me think seriously."

"That was?" He wasn't pushing, she could tell that, but he wanted to know, and really since she was still battling with what it meant for her, and the three men in her life that she was now thinking over. She'd wanted to invite the third over, but she knew that last night wasn't the night for it, so Sam hadn't even been second choice, he'd been third.

"_The heart wants what the heart wants_." It did, and she knew it.

"That means?" Clearly, James wanted to be sure that she honestly believed what she was saying. That was something he'd always been good at doing, and she'd always been happy to let him do. It helped her.

She sighed and shrugged. There was only one answer, and that was the one she'd give. "Last night I had a choice, you or Sam. I picked you." She'd called Sam and cancelled their plans, called James and invited him over. She could have invited Sam over, but she didn't. So she realised she'd made a choice. "I think that says it all about Sam's place in my life. So I'm going to call it quits."

"I'm sorry about that." She didn't quite understand why he was apologising. He hadn't forcer the choice upon her, hadn't said 'hey it's me pick me'. He'd just been here, while she'd been struggling to make a decision about him.

"I know, wasn't your choice though. That was mine." Merri was going to own it. She'd made the decision to call James, and she'd made the choice of asking him to come over, and then she'd been the one to make the first move. Not something anyone could say often when it came to James.

"I did notice something though." James ran his fingers up her arm then booped them on her nose before she had chance to stop him, distracting her for just a moment.

"What?" Now she was curious. He'd only seen her a couple of times, one of them at a crime scene when she'd been full of gear. Catching a glimpse of her colleagues for a few seconds.

"You and your boss?" James left that hanging, and Merri had to blink a couple of times. She and Pride had been dancing around _something_ for months. Sleeping together when need or loneliness got the better of both of them. So far they hadn't even mentioned it outside of those nights, and it never even entered her mind when she was working, but somehow James knew.

"Pride? What about him?" She just wasn't going to let him know exactly how right he was, not just yet anyway. She didn't want him to think he knew her quite that well, though clearly the years since they'd last seen each other hadn't changed much.

"You seemed like a good match." James smiled, not letting her get away with it, but also not saying it outright. For a journalist, he was good at that. How had she ever really thought that would work. A federal agent and a journalist? It didn't matter, in the end.

"He's a good guy." She commented, bringing her thoughts back to Pride, and that turned out to be a mistake. Her first thought was when he had her pinned against the wall outside interrogation, the second was him pinning her to his bed. She shook her head to get those thoughts out, then turned her attention back to James.

James looked at her seriously, and that was when Merri knew he had her number. Somehow he knew about her relationship with Pride, or whatever you could call it, the situation. He also knew that really she wanted more than that, but was too chicken right now. That was why she'd ended up calling James to begin with. "Has this changed your mind about him. Clearly Sam the Psychologist didn't."

"How do you know I was doing anything with Pride?" he seemed to know a lot more about her prospective relationships than he should have known from pure chance, but she knew there would be some clever reason. He'd always known things he shouldn't have known, always.

"I know you, I've known you for a long time." That was also true. They'd been together for almost three years, engaged for one, and in all that time he'd probably gotten to know her better than anyone but Emily had. Suddenly, it made sense he'd known. "So tell me what you're going to do there?" He asked, and for the first time all morning she didn't have an answer.

"I don't know. That thing is just, a thing." She didn't know how else to describe it. It wasn't really a relationship, it was something though. It was more than nothing, but less than something. In that twilight zone of relationships. "It's when we need closeness, that happens a lot in our jobs, he just got divorced and, since I've been seeing Sam he backed off, unless I went to him."

"MB you were always one that was hard to pin down." James chuckled, and that made her smile, for parts of their first year together she'd been on the _Moultrie_, and after that she'd depended on him, but eventually she'd got over that, and went back to her usual ways. That was why she knew he understood her. "One or the other of us was always going to leave in the end, and I'm sorry it was me who left first."

"You never showed me the pictures you took." That was all she could think. His assignment in Afghanistan. She knew he'd won an award for the pictures he'd taken there, working on a contract basis for the BBC, but she had never seen them, and she hoped that maybe he'd show them to her.

"Next time I'm in town." He smiled, finally getting out of the bed and searching around for his clothes. Somehow she wasn't at all sad that he was leaving, unlike the last few times, this time she just hoped he was doing something that made him happy. "I've got to get my thing then get to the airport."

"Ah yes, Dubai." She smiled, remembering that that was where he was going to this time. That was going to be an interesting place, and somewhere she wanted to go one day. Just not with him.

Once he was dressed he smiled, then bent down and kissed her one last time. She knew it was the last, probably as well as he did. Maybe that was why it lingered so long. "Take my calls next time, and tell me if anything happens with your boss. Sam the Psychologist I was happy to meddle with. Your boss... I don't know, I think you two suit."

"See you next time, James." That was all she could think to say to that as he walked to the other end of the room ready to show himself out. No doubt back to the hotel then onto the airport and Dubai and wherever else his travels would take him.

"Yes you will. I guarantee it." That sounded like both a promise and a threat. "If the heart wants what it wants, MB, you might want to look again at your boss." James said as parting words. She just thought for a second and wondered how she'd gotten to this point in her life. She had thought she'd said goodbye to James a long time ago, the baggage that came along with him, but the fact that they had ended up doing this, twice, in just a few days told her she hadn't said goodbye. Until now. He'd told her that Pride was the right choice, and maybe he was. Time would tell.


	2. Pride

**Alright. This wouldn't leave me alone, and I had to write a chapter where Merri spoke to Pride after what she spoke about with James. The lyrics at the beginning are from the song "Fallout" by Marianas Trench.  
Shin xx**

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_**Well now there's him  
And now there's me  
A secret to give  
And a secret to keep**_

After James left a shower and getting ready for a day of doing nothing had been her first thoughts, but midway through her shower she started thinking again about what James had said about Pride, and about what she had admitted. That was when she realised that James had been right. She should have gone with her first instinct and called Pride, not him. As soon as she was done she pulled on the first clothes she could find and set off to the office. Walking in she knew that he was there, because the smell of breakfast hung in the air. Considering she didn't see him anywhere she was sure that he was in his room. "King, King let me in." She hammered on the door, and smiled when he opened it, she must have looked a sight, sweatpants, an oversized t-shirt and wet hair, but she didn't care.

"It's your day off today." He commented, just standing in the doorway, alright he wasn't letting her in, but he hadn't shut the door in her face. That was something at least. Maybe, eventually, he'd just let her in. Today being her day off didn't even register.

"I know, but I need to talk to you." That was the point. Right now it wasn't even that she just wanted to talk to him, she actually needed to. There were things about this situation that she just needed to tell him.

"What did I do?" He asked, and that threw her off. Why did he think it was anything he'd done. She didn't even know how to reply to that other than look at him for a second.

"What?" She was too confused to say anything else.

"Normally when someone is banging on my door demanding I let them in I've either done something or I owe them money." It was at that moment he stepped back and let her past him into this room. Maybe he'd realised how much she just need to talk to him, or maybe he was just fed up of being stood at the door in his boxers. "Merri what is going on."

"I slept with James last night." She pronounced, and had to take a breath before she was able to say anything else.

"Alright, I don't know why you thought I needed to know that but well done I guess." He didn't give her the chance to gather her thoughts, and she once again just had to stand looking at him for a moment, gathering her mind.

She shook her head, realising that he didn't understand, or maybe she just wasn't explaining it very well. Or at all really. She should have followed up her statement with why that was important. "No, you don't understand, probably because I'm not thinking it well." She was going to accept that too. So she went back to the root of all the decisions she'd made in the last 24 hours. "Remember how Mama T said about the heart wanting what it wants?"

"And yours wanted James...?" He asked, drawing a conclusion without letting her explain. She'd hoped it was just a yes or no answer, but apparently not.

"No shut up you idiot." That was probably not a good thing to say to your boss, but right now she wasn't thinking of him that way, she was only thinking of him as someone she was interested in. "Mine wanted you." That was as simply as she could put it, so explaining why she called James was necessary. "I called James because I needed a distraction and that's what he was good for. But he saw the two of us coming out of a crime scene for thirty seconds and he knew. He knew we were a good fit." She ran out of breath and had to pause, which was probably a relief to Pride.

"I'm confused." He said simply, then took her by the shoulders and moved her to the bed and sat her on the edge, coming to kneel in front of her after a moment, looking at her with more than a hint of concern. "You need to take a moment, take a breath, and explain calmly."

"Look, I realised while talking to James that he wasn't the person I first wanted to call last night." This was going to be the confession that changed things, at least for her. She was happy to just tell him, and she didn't really expect anything more. He just deserved to know. "The person I wanted to call was you. I called him because I didn't want to cross a line, but today he made me realise that maybe it was time I cross that line." She knew that it was time. If James could see how she felt, then she was more obvious than she wanted to admit.

"What about Sam?" Pride asked, and she knew that that was over, in fact she'd already ended it.

"History." She shook her head. Sam deserved someone who could dedicate time to him. That wasn't her, and it never would be. She needed someone who understood the job. She'd hardly been faithful to him anyway, even before James' reappearance. "I wouldn't have slept with James the other day if I was serious about Sam, and I wouldn't have slept with you all those other times." James wasn't the cause of the fire, he was merely the catalyst.

He just looked at her for a second, and it was clear that he was still confused as to how her ex-fiancé had helped her work any of this out. It made sense to her though, that was the important thing. "How did James make you realise any of this?"

"By being himself it's hard to explain to anyone." James as a person was hard to explain to anyone, but he had a way about him, something that made her think about her life, every time he turned up. "The point is... I don't want us to just be a thing in the night. I don't want to be sneaking out of here at 2am anymore. I don't want to be-" She was stopped from saying anything else by Pride pressing his lips to hers. Once the surprise wore off she smiled, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him back twice as hard.

When they finally broke apart he jut pressed his forehead to hers and smiled, clearly this was something he'd been waiting for. "I get it, I've wanted that from the start but I didn't want to push you, that's not who I am." She knew that, and pressed her own little kiss on his lips before pulling back and grinning. "I'm just glad you finally see it." He smiled that dopey grin he got when he was happy, and she couldn't help but return it.

"I do, I really do." That was the long and short of it, she saw it now, and they could start building. Merri had spent far too long protecting herself after James left, but now he had helped her see that all she was doing was preventing herself from enjoying one of the best things in her life. Now she was going to start living up to that, and dealing with the fallout from his visit was, hopefully, going to push her in a whole new direction. Truth be told, she couldn't wait.


End file.
